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The crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has written more than forty books, which have altogether sold more than a hundred and twenty million copies. (This week, a long-awaited adaptation of her “Scarpetta” series, which centers on a forensic pathologist, premières on Amazon, with Nicole Kidman in the title role.) How does she do it? “I learned early on that the biggest enemy of creativity is fear,” she writes in her memoir, “True Crime,” which comes out in May. One of her goals for the book, she said recently, was to pass on some of her own advice—to impress upon people that creative endeavors are living, reactive things, and that they shouldn’t give up in the face of rejection. Not long ago, she joined us to discuss some books, new and old, that have offered her creative guidance. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.

The Creative Act: A Way of Being

by Rick Rubin

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Sometimes when you’re doing something creative—for me, that’s writing—it feels like you’re conducting electricity. You’re channelling something that comes from outside of you. My favorite books—whether nonfiction or novels—are the ones where you can feel the author’s DNA on them, but also feel, at the same time, like they almost came from elsewhere.

One of the reasons I like “The Creative Act” so much is because it talks about that process, and about how you’ve got to keep your current unfettered by all the distractions in life. The book reminds me a little bit of “The Artist’s Way”—they both have a little bit of Zen to them, and at the same time they get down to concrete questions like, How do you not have writer’s block? Rubin’s answer for some of these is that you just have to be willing to get out of your own way. If you get hung up on what people think of you, or fame, or fortune, or, you know, “You’ve got to stick this in here because it’s popular right now,” you get further from whatever truth it was within you that motivated you to be creative in the first place.

The Silence of the Lambs

by Thomas Harris

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I really, truly think this is the best crime novel ever written. I read “Silence of the Lambs” when I was dabbling with starting “Postmortem,” which was my fourth attempt to write a “Scarpetta” novel—the first three were failures—and ended up being my début. I try to learn from masterpieces, and this one taught me a lot. I have a signed first edition that’s in a clamshell. Now and then, I pick it up and look at it to remind myself of how important it is to tell really dramatic scenes that almost aren’t possible, but in such a way that nobody doubts them. Let’s be honest—there are crude versions of maniacs out there that have done similar things as Hannibal Lecter has, but the difference is you don’t doubt him. And yet, at the same time, he is surreal. To me, he feels more like myth than reality, and that’s what makes the book work so well.

The Garden of Eden

by Ernest Hemingway

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The reason I love this book—which Hemingway never finished, and which was published in a heavily edited, abridged form after he died—is that it almost feels like a friend. It’s about a young writer who is beginning to get great reviews. He’s newly married, and he and his wife are honeymooning in Europe. The novel is an incredible study of human nature, viewed through the lens of this young and dysfunctional relationship, but it’s also a peep into Hemingway’s mind as an author.

I like to keep a copy of this one nearby, too, because if there’s one writer I would aspire to write like, it’s Hemingway. His prose has a photographic quality that just takes my breath away. You can feel the cold stone under the character’s bare feet as he’s walking. You can smell the pencils as he sharpens them and looks out at the day and wonders what it will bring.

In Cold Blood

by Truman Capote

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This is an account of a murder case in Kansas that took place in 1959. It is beautifully crafted. Look at the beginning, where Capote gives you a snapshot of Kansas—I mean, you can taste the dust. He was just that fine a writer.

Capote called the book a nonfiction novel. We don’t really know if it is fish or fowl. I mean, what is he doing with us? Am I supposed to believe it really happened like this? For my part, I think there is probably a lot more fact to “In Cold Blood” than there is fiction. What Capote did was remarkable—spending time with the two killers, talking to them in prison, witnessing their execution. What also interests me about “In Cold Blood” is the way that Capote—who spent years following the case—in some ways, became part of the story he was telling, as he was telling it. That resonates for me, because I also do very intense research. I visit morgues and crime scenes and spend time with people involved in real serial-murder cases. What starts out as research becomes a drama that you’re living. You’ve gotten to know people, and they want things from you, and suddenly people get angry, and you even feel in danger. I marvel at what he did so long ago, when most writers weren’t doing things like that.

In January, a few days after U.S. commandos raided the fortified compound of the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, and flew him in handcuffs to New York, Donald Trump told the Times, “I don’t need international law.” The only limit on his global powers, he said, was “my own morality. My own mind.” Not long after, Trump claimed that Greenland’s strategic location and reserves of critical minerals made it too valuable to remain outside of direct U.S. control. (“You defend ownership. You don’t defend leases,” he said.) Last month, Trump oversaw the launch of the Board of Peace, a body of more than two dozen member countries with the stated mission of reconstructing Gaza, which Trump has advertised as a possible replacement for the United Nations. Now, most dramatically, the U.S. and Israel have started a war against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the very first day.

For many years, the conventional wisdom on Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, was that he hungered for a world in which power and interests, not norms or international law, drove state behavior. Ideas like empire and spheres of influence were not anachronisms or pejoratives but descriptors of how geopolitics functions in practice. Large countries with strong militaries could impart their will on smaller ones; institutions were to be bypassed and weakened, freeing superpowers to act.

In the wake of Khamenei’s killing, Putin offered pro-forma objections to “armed Israeli-American aggression,” calling the “assassination” of Iran’s Supreme Leader a “cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.” But, on a more fundamental level, Putin was facing an unsettling new reality: his vision of the world was coming to pass, except he had been deprived of authorship and influence. “This was supposed to be the Putin model,” Hanna Notte, the director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and the author of a forthcoming book on Russian foreign policy, told me. “The irony is, now that it’s Trump who is carrying it out, it only exposes the limits of Russian power.”

Before the war, Russia saw Iran as an important part of its larger project to create alternative alliances and centers of power. The so-called North-South Transport Corridor is a joint project to link Russian and Iranian ports with those in India to move goods and freight while bypassing U.S. sanctions. Last year, Iran signed a free-trade agreement with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, a sign that Moscow was continuing to extend its influence beyond the post-Soviet space. Russia and Iran also linked their two national payment systems, a test case in the Kremlin’s pursuit of “de-dollarization” deals with other nations. “I don’t know if you’d quite call Iran a partner, ally, or friend,” a foreign-policy source in Moscow said. “But it has been a valuable asset.”

In 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stalled, Russia and Iran deepened their military relationship, but only to a point. Russian forces relied on Iranian-supplied drones and related technology to compete on the battlefield and inflict damage on Ukrainian cities; these days, Russia has set up extensive drone production at home, making more advanced models than the Iranians could provide, and so it doesn’t need Iran’s help in the way it once did. Last year, Moscow and Tehran signed a wide-ranging treaty, known as a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” but the agreement did not contain explicit security provisions. (A similar pact that Russia signed with North Korea in 2024, by comparison, does stipulate that the two countries would aid each other in the event of an attack.)

Still, Khamenei’s death represented Russia’s third loss of an important geopolitical client in a little over a year: in December, 2024, Bashar al-Assad, a longtime Russian ally, whom the Kremlin had protected to varying degrees for more than a decade, was forced from power by rebel militias (he’s now thought to be living in an exclusive gated community in Moscow); a year later, Maduro, Putin’s principal ally in South America, was captured by the U.S. Both former leaders were, like Khamenei, essential to Russia’s efforts to bypass existing multilateral frameworks, governing everything from trade to security, that the Kremlin had viewed as the domain of the U.S. It was as if Putin’s project to undermine the world order was being blown apart by an even greater disruption.

The result is that Russia not only looks like a second-order power but one that is, perhaps unexpectedly, longing for the bygone world of rules, norms, and institutions. “We have all lost what we call international law,” Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said in response to the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran. The foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, called on the U.S. to “explain its plans and how these correspond with the rules that essentially existed earlier.” As the Moscow foreign-policy source put it, “The current paradigm seems to be that the U.S. does what it wants, and no one else, Russia included, can do much about it.”

Since 2022, Russia’s goals of achieving military and political victory in Ukraine have, in truth, consumed nearly the whole of the country’s efforts and interests on the international stage. “The outcome of that war will represent the ultimate verdict on Russian power and how it is seen in the world,” Notte said. “By definition, that means that other theatres and conflicts end up deprioritized.” Trump is seen in Moscow as Russia’s best hope for delivering a favorable outcome in Ukraine. That still remains Putin’s only real strategy: keep up the fight and keep increasing the costs for both Ukraine and Europe until Trump brings them to their senses. “Our leadership is so focussed on the question of Ukraine, everything else looks secondary in comparison,” the Moscow foreign-policy source said. “If there remains any chance at all that Trump can help with Ukraine, that’s enough of an argument not to create problems for yourself in other areas.”

A day after Putin denounced Khamenei’s killing, Peskov expressed “deep disappointment” that U.S. talks with Iran had failed, while also making it clear that Russia “highly values the mediation efforts of the United States” in Ukraine. Russia is reportedly maintaining some of its commitments to Iran, providing the regime with intelligence for targeting U.S. forces and installations in the Middle East. “If the U.S. helps Ukraine with this, I don’t see why Russia can’t do the same,” the Moscow foreign-policy source said. But, they added, “it’s obvious the Kremlin doesn’t want to greatly upset Trump, and will err on playing it safe in avoiding red lines.”

In the meantime, Russia is pursuing whatever advantages it can from the war in Iran. The U.S. is burning through its stock of air-defense interceptors, one of the most crucial weapons for Ukraine—the more that are fired over the skies of the Middle East, the less there are to defend those above Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Dnipro. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba has been appointed Iran’s new Supreme Leader, but whatever political regime survives the war will likely be more vulnerable than ever. “A weak, unstable, battered Iran is exactly the kind of state that will need Russia, and China, all the more,” Notte said. “There’s much for Russia not to like about this war, but seeing as it happened they want to reap the maximum benefits.”

Above all, the war is yielding enormous profits for Russia on the global energy markets. Around a third of Russia’s budget depends on oil and gas sales. Before the bombing began, oil was trading below seventy dollars a barrel; it later spiked to nearly a hundred and twenty, though it has since settled at around ninety dollars. Apart from crude-oil prices, Russia’s exports avoid the bottleneck currently choking the Strait of Hormuz, by travelling via the Bosphorus or through overland pipelines. Earlier this winter, China and India were demanding a discount of between twenty and thirty dollars a barrel on Russian crude, a reflection of sanctions and shipping risks; now, with Russia’s sudden reëmergence as an essential supplier, its oil has been trading at a premium in some markets. Alexandra Prokopenko, a former adviser at Russia’s central bank and a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told me that, if current prices hold, Russia stands to net an additional three and a half billion dollars in revenue a month—as much as a third of the estimated total monthly cost of the war in Ukraine.

Russian oil supply is also essential to Trump, who desperately wants to avoid a prolonged and painful rise in energy prices. Last week, he granted India a temporary waiver from U.S. sanctions on Russian oil. Prokopenko said that the move contained an important message. “Before, the U.S. was very careful to coördinate sanctions policy with Western partners,” she reflected. “Now it just acts on its own.” Moreover, she added, “if you start to dilute the sanctions regime in one place, why not do it in another?”

On Monday, Trump and Putin had a phone call to discuss the war in Iran. Hours before the call, Putin had warned publicly that, because of stalled traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, the world was on the brink of a major energy crisis. Now he was offering to help broker a peace deal with Iran. Trump later said that he told Putin, “You could be more ​helpful by getting the Ukraine-Russia war over with.” At the same time, Trump announced that, to address energy supplies, he plans to ease sanctions on “some countries.” It appeared that Putin had won another exchange with Trump. But, Notte told me, a basic truth remains, with unpleasant implications in Moscow. “Trump doesn’t really ask Putin what he thinks,” she said. “He just acts as he likes.”

The windfall from the energy trade may not ultimately change much for Russia’s strategic position. Its most pressing economic issues are inflation and the outsized role of military industry, neither of which can be solved by extra revenues alone. Prokopenko told me, “The Russian economy is stagnating not because there isn’t money but, rather, because it has become wrapped in knots due to the war in Ukraine.” Not long ago, Prokopenko thought that Putin could face an economic reckoning in early 2027. Whatever relief the war in Iran brings will be temporary. “He got lucky,” she said. “Maybe he can put that off a while longer.” ♦

Since the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, over a week ago, more than one thousand Iranians have reportedly been killed, and Iran has responded by attacking various Gulf states—such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—which are allied with the U.S. Meanwhile, Israel has also been relentlessly bombing Lebanon, with the intention of disarming or wiping out Hezbollah, a paramilitary group backed by Iran which fired rockets at Israel earlier in the war. (Almost seven hundred thousand people have been driven out of their homes in Lebanon since Israel began its campaign, per the U.N.) Although many of the Gulf states have worked to counter Iranian influence in the region, often by way of military conflicts waged through proxies, there is no strong evidence that they supported the decision by the U.S. to attack Iran.

I recently spoke by phone with Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the British think tank Chatham House, and a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, to understand how countries in the Gulf were balancing animosity toward the Iranian regime with concerns about what a wider war could mean for the region and the global economy. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Before the war started, there was a lot of talk that many of the Sunni states in the Middle East, which had historically been opposed to Iran, were nevertheless concerned that Israel was on the verge of becoming the regional hegemon. How do you look at that question now, after more than a week of the United States and Israel’s waging an extremely aggressive war with shifting goals?

First of all, I would perhaps recharacterize the states you’re talking about, so as not to refer to them as Sunni states. I think the sectarian prism is a bit of a dated way to categorize the region, and is frequently the way Israel goes about dividing a region that is much more of a mosaic and a tapestry of different identities that don’t fit cleanly in these sectarian blocks. But most of the countries around Iran are really caught between two destabilizing regional states.

Iran has been a historical threat for most of its neighbors since 1979, but even before that, under the Pahlavi monarchy, it did exert hegemonic influence. And since October 7th, as Israel revised its security strategy away from what it calls “mowing the lawn,” or containing Iran-backed threats, Arab states have seen Israel as an actively destabilizing regional force. This is not because they don’t understand Israel’s security concerns, or because they support Hamas or Hezbollah. They see these groups as extremists, obviously Iran-backed, and responsible for weak governance in Palestine, in Lebanon, et cetera. But, in tandem, they see Israel’s behavior across the region as having gone far beyond degrading these groups and moving into regional destabilization, which is a serious challenge for Arab states.

I think the biggest example of this, which shows this challenge for regional states, particularly Gulf Arab states, is what took place in Qatar just last year. An American airbase in the country was hit by Iranian missiles as part of the twelve-day war last June, in which America and Israel attacked Iran, and then Qatar was also hit by Israel later that year, when the Israelis targeted Hamas leaders in Doha. Those attacks really exemplified and amplified the challenge for a lot of Arab states across the region. They don’t have the ability to manage or contain Israel or Iran.

There has been conflicting speculation and opinion about how the Gulf states, mainly Saudi Arabia, view this conflict, and especially how they viewed the possibility of conflict before it started. Do you have an understanding of whether they were in favor of the United States and Israel attacking Iran?

I think that the entire region knew that a war was inevitable in 2026, because the twelve-day war last June didn’t fully address the security issues from the perspective of the U.S. and Israel. And for the Gulf states, in particular, they were very acutely worried that this war would produce a massive destabilization that would end up with them as the targets. Why did they think that? Well, first of all, Iran had been messaging and warning them, making clear that this would be their response strategy. And, second, the Gulf states have been on the front line of past wars in the Gulf, going back to the Iran-Iraq War in the nineteen-eighties, and obviously the 1990 Gulf War. They collectively and individually lobbied the Bush Administration not to go into Iraq in 2003. And again, going into 2026, they pursued the same strategy. They recognized that this war would risk creating a conflict that spilled over into other countries in the region. So, bilaterally and collectively, they first pursued a strategy of trying to implore the Trump Administration to pursue diplomacy with Iran.

The Washington Post has reported that Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, was in favor of the war, for example, although the Saudis have denied this. But you are skeptical of the claim that they were in favor?

Yeah. There could have been some sort of eleventh-hour effort at convincing the Trump Administration that, if they were going to attack Iran, to try to do it properly and execute a war that wouldn’t leave the region vulnerable. But I think the fears of Gulf states have been borne out even worse than they imagined, because, obviously, the Iranians have struck more than just military installations, with strikes on infrastructure, energy sites, and civilian spaces. The diversity of these targets has exposed the weakness in the security architecture of Gulf states, and the reality of their geography being their destiny. And the strikes have also brought up a host of other issues. For example, the United States actually didn’t protect Gulf interests and prioritized protecting Israel’s interests. So the war has brought up a lot of security challenges that cannot be quickly or easily resolved. And I think the worst-case scenario for the Gulf states is playing out, because they’re seeing a U.S.-Israeli operation being executed very effectively, perhaps, on a military level, but with no day-after planning, and they recognize that President Trump has a short attention span and, as pressure mounts, could abruptly exit this war, leaving the region both paying the price for the war, and also exposed to what version of the Islamic Republic remains.

Does that mean you think the Gulf States hope that the Americans and the Israelis only stop the war after there is regime change in Iran and the Islamic Republic has come to an end, or do you think they just want the war to be over quickly?

I think that they want both things, but they’re very aware that the former is unachievable. You cannot fully dismantle this regime. That’s the reality. It’s heavily institutionalized and bureaucratized. And, even if you eliminate chains of command by killing and decapitating, there will still be bureaucrats, technocrats, and security officials who have been part of this regime. I think that they want this war to end as soon as possible, but they remain very anxious about the day after. And they think that a weakened, fragmented, divided Iran is going to be equally hard on its neighbors, from a humanitarian perspective, from an economic perspective, and from a security perspective. And we should also, obviously, say very clearly that the populations of these states have been watching the Gaza war for over two years and have become heavily politicized, and are now living through this war which has punctured the image of the Gulf as a safe haven for economic interests and as a destination for tourists. And they look vulnerable to Iranian attacks, even though they have mounted very effective defensive operations. That defense is a silver lining, but vulnerabilities have still been revealed.

You mentioned the Gulf states trying to convince the Bush Administration that invading Iraq was a mistake, and I’m thinking about how the relationship between the Gulf states and America has changed since then. One factor that feels very different from 2002 or 2003 is that some of the governments of the Gulf states have been paying Trump and his family. The Wall Street Journal reported that a U.A.E. government official invested half a billion dollars in the Trump family’s crypto company. Qatar basically bought Trump a plane. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is involved in business opportunities throughout the Middle East. And yet all of this added up to very little for the Gulf states. Does that make you question the relationship going forward?

I think this is a really important point, because the Gulf states were quite enthusiastic about Trump returning to office. They obviously were so deeply frustrated, if not angry, with President Biden for his position on the Gaza war, and for his overly indulgent position toward Netanyahu during the war. And so they saw President Trump as being more pragmatic, transactional, and they hosted him very early on in his second term in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha, where he made this famous speech criticizing the idea of regime change and promised that the era of neoconservative American-funded operations in the region would be over, and this was a new America that with the Middle East was going to focus on “commerce, not chaos” and exporting “technology, not terrorism.” And this was wholly celebrated across the Gulf, that they would continue to be able to do business with the President and his family, and that the U.S. respected them, saw them as stable partners.

And I think, unfortunately, since then, they’ve been deeply disappointed by the Trump Administration. They’ve invested in the United States financially, and, I would say, they are still deeply committed to, and invested in, their security relationship with the U.S. Qatar, before this, had doubled down on its relationship with the U.S. It’s not just Qatar—each Gulf state has its own offering to the U.S., if you will, be it tech, be it a regional role, et cetera. Going forward, I don’t think this style of relationship is going to change right away, but there are certainly deep frustrations across the Gulf that this war has exposed, and concerns that it has made them vulnerable, that America hasn’t had their back. And I think there will be a tail to this.

You said that the Gulf states were fed up with Biden over Gaza. Saudi Arabia was also fed up at the beginning of Biden’s term, over what it perceived to be his moralism about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. But I always assumed that the reason people like Mohammed bin Salman were angry about Gaza was not the reasons many of us were angry about Gaza but, rather, because he hoped that, after some sort of fig-leaf peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, you could have normalization agreements between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and Saudi business in the region would go more smoothly, while the Palestinian problem would be pushed to the side, and this was how the Middle East could function. And October 7th and the Gaza war made clear that that was a fiction, if it ever had been truly possible. And then what the past few years have revealed is not just that these countries can’t align with Israel, because their publics would be very angry about it, but that Israel is also now being so aggressive in the region that they have to rethink that entire idea. Is that too cynical?

No. The cynicism prevails. Many Gulf leaders were clearly flirting with the idea that normalization could, through stronger economic ties and security partnerships, lead to greater regional integration, with or without the Palestinians. But there were two missing pieces in this vision for the region. One was the very clear sidestepping of Palestinian sovereignty, and the second was the issue of Iran. And I think these issues were ignored because people were taking too much of a zero-sum approach to the idea of normalization.

What do you mean?

Israelis see normalization as support of Israel at the expense of Iran. But the Abraham Accords weren’t an overt security arrangement. Israel has not come to the defense of those states, for example. Certainly, the U.A.E. and Bahrain—which signed the Abraham Accords—and Israel share a view that Iran is a destabilizing regional threat, but they diverge on how to manage Iran as a regional threat, right? And for other Gulf states, like Saudi Arabia or beyond, their alignment with Israel on seeing Iran in a negative way aside, they couldn’t publicly allow themselves to be perceived as pro-Israel, given the war in Gaza. And so, in addition to the challenge of the Palestinians, this has led to an abrupt halt in talking about normalization, at least for now. It doesn’t mean it can’t resurface in the future. Right now, Israel is seen as aggressive and destabilizing, and normalizing relations would be a real challenge.

So you’re essentially saying that the Israelis saw normalization with the Gulf states as part of a strategy to contain Iran.

A hundred per cent.

But the Gulf states saw it differently? What was their rationale, then? The Saudis would get access to nuclear technology from the United States, which the Biden Administration implied it would help them with in return for normalization?

I think that there were many reasons for the Gulf states to move forward with normalization. It made sense to integrate; it made sense to share technology and build and benefit from Israel’s strong defense capabilities. But I think, ultimately, for many of the countries, this was also about the United States. It was about anchoring the U.S. as a partner in the accords to keep the United States engaged and present in the region. I think there were multiple motivations, and maybe, behind the scenes, there was this thought of, O.K., well, we’ll work together to share intelligence. We’re going to eventually integrate our air defenses—but it wasn’t going to result in this immediate anti-Iranian alliance, as the U.S. has tried to pitch it, or as many sorts of strategists would have hoped it would be.

In your first answer, you said that looking at the region through a lens of Sunni versus Shia is misleading in some way, especially when it comes to Iran’s poor relations with some of its neighbors. But, certainly, many of the proxy conflicts that Iran and these states have got involved in, from Syria to Lebanon, have had this through line. So, can you explain why you don’t like that framing?

First of all, their populations are much more diverse. Second, not all Shia groups are the same, nor are they aligned. Third, we are post-sectarian in the Middle East, and that has been a sort of ideological shift that we have seen over the past ten years as well. As countries have normalized, they’ve moved away from instrumentalizing religious rhetoric. All the way down to Saudi Arabia, there’s been a step away from this religious language. The problems between these states are structural, about competition, and about power. I don’t think that religion and identity explain the tensions, even if they are sometimes used by leaders to justify competition and regional interventionism, for example. Yes, Iran has had a greater degree of success in working with Shia groups like Hezbollah, but Iran also has a broad array of non-state relationships that don’t align that way.

Such as Hamas.

Hamas, yes, and some non-state-actor groups in Iraq. And the Assad regime wasn’t a so-called Twelver Shia state. The commonality of these groups is less about religion and more about resistance to the U.S. and Israel. But, second, the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia have been embracing more liberal interpretations of Islam and less exportation of Islam across the region, which has been received well internationally as well as regionally. Just look at the competition with, and eventual blockade of, Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and others, which started in 2017. So many of these issues are driven by issues of governance, economic competition, and various regional rivalries, which sometimes play out through proxy groups. It’s much more complicated now than Sunni vs. Shia. ♦

On TikTok, the war against Iran began with a series of videos from influencer types in Dubai, Doha, and elsewhere in the Middle East. They sat on restaurant patios or on hotel-room balconies and pointed their phone cameras skyward to document missiles flying through the air of their respective cities, then disappearing into puffs of smoke as they were shot down. Once you’d watched one video—say, a poolside clip from the British fitness influencer Will Bailey, narrating a nearby explosion over the beat of house music—more followed in an algorithmic deluge. After footage of the airborne violence came video diaries of travellers scrambling to exit various countries and recording frustrated monologues at jammed airports amid cancelled flights. Next, the lucky ones who got out posted relieved dispatches from the air en route elsewhere. This is war as professionalized social content: well-lit selfie videos, shot skillfully while casually driving a car or riding a horse, recounting pilates classes, matcha in hand—only this time in the middle of air-strike zones.

Global conflict has played out over social media for many years now, dating back to the Twitter-based organizing of the Arab Spring, but the current warfare in the Middle East marks a new level of saturation. Personal footage mingles with official releases from state militaries that are now proficient in the language of the internet. Any clear hierarchy of trustworthy information remains elusive as on-the-ground videos come from all directions, and government agencies are as likely to post memes as anonymous online trolls. The White House X account posts a montage that splices video-game simulations of warfare with seemingly unclassified footage of real-life missile strikes in Iran. The Israel Defense Forces X account publishes a clip of fighter jets in the air with the caption “On our way to make history ✈️” set to strains of “Fortunate Son,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. (Never mind that the song was an anthem of opposition to the Vietnam War.) It took days for footage from more traditional news outlets to emerge, showing black rain falling from the sky in the aftermath of strikes on oil depots. Even that looked bizarre and surreal—a nightmare generated by A.I.? Each new video encountered online requires a moment’s scanning for signs of fakery.

Many of the fragments spreading through the digital panopticon comprise real footage of real events, but their cumulative effect is far from a cogent portrait. Instead, it’s something like what the French philosopher Paul Virilio, in his 1998 book “The Information Bomb,” labelled a coming “visual crash”: a “real-time globalization of telecommunications” in which any significant event in the world is live-streamed and broadcast, and the overflow of detail causes a “defeat of facts” and a “disorientation of our relation to reality.” Virilio was writing at the turn of the century, when the globalization of financial markets had created a risk of sudden, worldwide economic collapse. Witnessing the Asian financial crisis of 1997, during which sinking Thai currency prices kicked off a contagious decline in economic confidence across the continent, Virilio foresaw a similar phenomenon in globalized media—a bankrupting of our trust in the information we receive. Virilio was making observations during the era of television and the early internet, before social media, MAGA lies, and A.I. further undermined the authority of the media ecosystem. The current feeling of incoherence is intensified by President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to explain his military campaign, and Republicans’ mealy-mouthed acquiescence: “We’re not at war right now,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said. This week, Trump has both proclaimed that the war is “very complete” and declared that “important targets” remain. (A post on X on March 9th from the Department of War promised “no mercy.”) We can find the conflict everywhere on the internet, but no accompanying theory of the case.

Virilio’s information-bomb concept applies beyond warfare. Online, every day, we are inundated with evidence of emergencies, crimes, and conspiracies that seem to elude comprehension. A driverless Waymo vehicle blocks an ambulance headed to the site of a mass shooting in Austin. Bill Clinton seems to laugh while paging through documents during his recent deposition on the Jeffrey Epstein files. Meanwhile, anyone online can browse Epstein’s correspondence on Jmail, a site that emulates the experience of browsing his Gmail inbox. Early this month, zoomed-in press cameras captured a creeping rash on President Trump’s neck, adding to a growing archive of his unexplained medical symptoms or injuries. Once the information bomb has detonated, even reality takes on the feeling of conspiracy.

Just a few years ago, social media still brought an aura of authenticity to battlefield dispatches. In 2022, I wrote about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the world’s “first TikTok war”; at that point, personal video footage from the victims of international warfare were relative novelties, and TikTok vlogs filmed from bomb shelters made some Ukrainian refugees famous. Now after four years of ongoing horrors in Ukraine, and more than two years of watching slaughter and suffering in Gaza, the latest war filling our feeds is just another numbing form of content, a digital arena in which competing forces try to assert conflicting viewpoints. The wider Iranian conflict is particularly well documented, in part because Dubai has openly courted influencers and content creators to boost its image as an international business hub and travel destination. Now that same group is apparently being mobilized to publish agitprop. On March 1st, the right-wing online agitator Ian Miles Cheong posted a video from a Dubai club where uniformed employees danced with sparklers and liquor bottles. It was presumably meant to land defiantly—a little regional war wasn’t going to stop the party—but it instead went viral for its ostentatious apathy. Around the same time, creators in the United Arab Emirates were posting coördinated videos saying that they were not scared of air strikes because they “trust” the U.A.E. and know that its ruling sheikhs, who are featured in adulatory clips, “protect” them. As the pro-Trump armies that thrive on Elon Musk’s X have likewise proved again and again, propaganda can now be crowdsourced just as easily as air-strike footage.

As American journalistic institutions are consolidated and politicized by tech billionaires seeking to dominate the industry, those who consume news on the internet are increasingly left to assemble the disparate pieces on their own. Thankfully, there’s a meme to describe that, too: “Monitoring the situation,” an ironic phrase popularized on X and elsewhere during Trump’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last year. It describes the social-media user’s manic scramble to follow every update at once, as if each of us might have a role to play in shaping outcomes, if only we knew enough about what was going on. We monitor the situation out of a deluded belief that we are more than just passive, confused bystanders to a spray of digital shrapnel. Musk recently embraced the phrase with a meme of eyes reddened from the intoxicating exhaustion of situation monitoring—a recreation more stimulating, the joke goes, than any chemical substance. Earlier this year, a Lebanese music-streaming executive named Elie Habib built a kind of D.I.Y. online situation room called World Monitor, which uses A.I. to display news of the latest international military strikes, internet outages, and fluctuating commodity prices. It’s the perfect place to track dozens of feeds at once—television channels, webcams, prediction markets wagering on war. But it only looks as though it holds answers. ♦